Thursday, September 23, 2010

Almost an Idea

It's basically a George W Bush Redux. It advocates no useful policy on enforcing the borders. It merely advocates (buried way down on page 20) to reaffirm the right of states to enforce immigration laws - a right they already have.

And I'm gunna go out on a limb and wager that it says nothing about eliminating racial preferences or CRA.

And that's the long and short of why Republicans will be lucky to hold anything of any worth, and an even better reason why our country may well be boned. Nothing meaningful on Wall Street lawlessness or entitlement spending either (Denninger points out that every tax dollar is eaten up by Medicaid/care,unemployment/welfare, and Social Security with EVERYTHING else being financed by debt).

Two points need to be made, I think:

The amount of debt being cranked out by our government(s) is sopping up every bit of private capital. This not only degrades private investment, it also gives our overseas dollars an unproductive home (foreign entities buying government debt instead of products from our private sector). The fact that debt was issued to bail out the debt collectors is disgusting to an incomprehensible degree and why the Republicans aren't making a point to try and claw that mess back is beyond me (well, not necessarily that, more like confirming my worst suspicions).

Eliminating government debt would have a fairly quick beneficial impact, but a bunch of sacrifice must be sold and, at least in my mind, nothing is more caustic to selling shared sacrifice within the nation than illegal immigration (and to a large extent corporate legal immigration). It's hard to sell tax increases when everyone knows who will be paying (three words: earned income tax credit), and hard to sell spending cuts when everyone knows who will get cut first (witness Obama cutting medicare to finance his health care fiasco). At least if we had a grasp of who our fellow Americans were and who we were trapped in our boundaries with it would be easier to come to terms with what has to be done.